Best drugstore in the movies?

Tension (1949, dir. John Berry) is a great film noir, with Richard Basehart as the cuckolded pharmacist Warren Quimby and Audrey Totter as his three- or four- or five-timing wife Claire. Also on board: Cyd Charisse and (briefly) William Conrad. Basehart and Totter are terrific as a stunningly mismatched couple. The real star of the film though is the drugstore, an “All-Nite Service” establishment at the corner of St. Ann’s and Thirteenth, wherever that is.

[“Tasty Food.” Click on each image for a larger view.]

Tension begins with a monologue by Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan):

You know, these stores have everything: raisins and radios, paregoric and phonographs, vitamin capsules and cap pistols. They’ll serve you a cup of coffee, sell you a pack of cigarettes or a postage stamp, and in a pinch they’ll even fill a prescription for you.

The store appears to have six main areas. Clockwise from the rear: a prescription counter, a lunch counter, a magazine rack, liquors and candy (both dandy), tobacco, and perfume.

[Warren Quimby fills a prescription. Notice, among other details, “Tomorrow’s Weather by Vicks.”]

[Quimby has a word with the loyal counterman Freddie (Tom D’Andrea).]

[Magazines, liquors, candy, and tobacco, as seen from behind the perfume counter. Mrs. Quimby has met her old friend Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough). He has a big car. She likes that. She’ll meet him outside.]

[Tobacco and perfume counters, as seen from behind the lunch counter. Notice the Eversharp Injection Blades display.]

My idea of a theme park: a dowdy-world drugstore, open all nite.

Further adventures in retail density
Harvey’s Hardware (Needham, Massachusetts)
Whelan’s Drug Store (a Berenice Abbott photograph)

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March 28, 2015: Here’s one more post about Tension and a Culver City theater: A movie theater in the movies.

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May 29, 2018: In 2013 a contributor to the SkyscraperPage Forum shared these screenshots and wondered where the drugstore was located. Another contributor replied and placed the drugstore at 3500 W. 6th Street, the southwest corner of W. 6th Street and S. Alexandria Avenue, Los Angeles. A third SkyscraperPage Forum contributor had already worked out the details in 2012. The drugstore exterior is that of the Chapman Park Pharmacy. To my eye, the drugstore interior looks too dense to be anything but real.

[Paregoric? Merriam-Webster explains: “camphorated tincture of opium used especially to relieve pain.” I know this word from reading William Burroughs.]

Rae Armantrout in NYT crossword

I’m giving away an answer, late in the day. If you do the syndicated New York Times crossword puzzle, please forget about this post within the next five weeks and six days.

I’m happy to see Rae Armantrout in the Times crossword. Years ago (1994) I wrote the first “scholarly” article on her work. Go Rae!

[And while I think of it: can we acknowledge that when in east-central Illinois someone refers to “the Times,” it’s only a persnickety snob who insists on asking “Which one?” Which one do ya think?]

Phone manners

[As seen in the 1940 New York City telephone directories. Click for a larger, clearer view.]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League

[Update: There’s now a post with excerpts from Phones Are for People.]

[Lewis Banci and Milburn Smith, The Ten O’Clock Scholar (1969).]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League was a short-lived movement that arose in 1962 and faded, it would seem, in 1964. Founded in San Francisco, the ADDL opposed “creeping numeralism” and fought a losing battle to preserve the use of telephone exchange names. I came across the group’s name while exploring the 1940 New York City telephone directories earlier this month. Among the ADDL’s members, the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, a co-author of the group’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). Here is what Hayakawa told Time (July 13, 1962):

“These people are systematically trying to destroy the use of memory. They tell you to ‘write it down,’ not memorize it. Try writing a telephone number down in a dark booth while groping for a pencil, searching in an obsolete phone book and gasping for breath. And all this in the name of efficiency! Engineers have a terrible intellectual weakness. ‘If it fits the machine,’ they say, ‘then it ought to fit people.’ This is something that bothers me very much: absentmindedness about people.”

The same Time article reported that the Bloomington, Indiana chapter of the ADDL had turned to a mild form of sabotage:

Interpreting the area code and seven digits as one huge number, they place calls by saying, “Operator, give me S.I. Hayakawa at four billion, one hundred fifty-five million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, three hundred and one.” Growls Chapter Leader Frederick Litto, “If they want digits, we’ll give them digits.”

I remember when grown-ups used to growl about automation and “computers.” I remember owning a button with the younger statement of those sentiments: “I am a human being: do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” I salute the ADDL’s affection for exchange names. Sign me up.

[Life, February 8, 1963.]

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Update: I have obtained a copy of Phones Are for People.

Related reading
Other exchange name posts

[Befuddled at memory frenzies? You can pick an exchange name for your telephone number from a 1955 list of Bell Telephone’s recommended exchange names, available from The Telephone EXchange Name Project.]

“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”

Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out — in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

“Exactly,” said the voice.

“They are telegrams?”

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Roger Ebert on memory and mortality

“Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know”: Roger Ebert, “I remember you” (Chicago Sun-Times).

[Do you know the song? Music by Victor Schertzinger, words by Johnny Mercer. Here’s a version by Doris Day.]

Domestic comedy

In a parking lot:

“If you’re looking for hinterlands, those are more hinter.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

[Me, I like to park in the hinterlands. Elaine, she understands.]

Noisy for Mac

Noisy is a free app (OS X 10.5 or later) that generates pink noise or white noise, masking background chatter and other distractions. Noisy is based on the old Mac app Noise, which never became a Universal Binary.

One can get the benefit of noise by running SimplyNoise in a browser or by downloading a SimplyNoise MP3. I have an hour of pink noise on my iPod, which has been a concentration-saver in coffeeshops. But I think it’s especially nice to get some noise by running a tiny app. To the anonymous developer who turned Noise into Noisy: thanks.

[Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.]

Dropbox invitation, anyone?

Dropbox now offers an extra 500MB of storage space to new users who sign up via an invitation. Thus a basic (free) account would now have 2.5GB. The inviter gets an extra 500MB as well. You can see where I’m going with this: here’s my referral link.

“They mess you up”

For the first time in a long time, the word mess has appeared in a Michiko Kakutani book review. From a review of Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems:

Many American readers know Larkin chiefly from his more darkly funny lines: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) — / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP” (from “Annus Mirabilis”). Or: “They mess you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you” (from “This Be The Verse”).

“This Be the Verse” begins like so: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” If the New York Times refuses to print fuck, couldn’t the reviewer have used asterisks to suggest the word? “They mess you up” is an exceedingly decorous and misleading paraphrase.

“This Be the Verse” may be read in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation.

Related posts
All instances of mess and messy in Kakutani’s writing for the Times, 1979–2010
One mess and one messy from 2011